Windows 7: what SP1 brings with it

For Windows 7, the first service pack doesn’t just group together all of the previously release security updates. For the home user, a few notable improvements have also been made.

Since Tuesday, Windows 7 users have been able to install Service Pack 1 which is being released via Windows Update. This release has come a week after the service pack for professionals. For the average user, this SP1 is notably presented as a big update that groups together all of the already deployed security and reliability updates released over the last year.

Released for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, the number of updates included in SP1 is for the moment less than the total number released - 800 hotfixes and security patches. There are a little less than forty security corrections.

The SP1 also integrates two new virtualisation functions integrated into Windows Server 2008 R2. RemoteFX is a hardware acceleration platform which allows remote users to work in a graphically rich environment (Aero, multimedia, 3D applications). Microsoft Dynamic Memory is an update to Windows Server Hyper-V which allows you to dynamically allocate more or less memory to each virtual machine.


For the home user
Even if the user has their OS up to date, the Windows 7 SP1 will still take a good half an hour to install due to the 44 MB download file for the 32-bit operating system and 74 MB for the 64-bit version. All of this for very little benefit? Not exactly.

With this SP1, three interesting changes have been included for the Windows 7 home user. Updates have been integrated to improve the performance of HDMI audio hardware. They have also corrected a range of issues noticed by users when connecting HDMI audio hardware to a Windows 7 PC, where the system would hang and require a reboot.

Another change can be seen in the printing of XPS documents which contain some pages in landscape and others in portrait. Via the XPS viewer presented by default in Windows 7, the printing could only handle a single display, and not both, which is now possible after the installation of SP1.

Finally, it should also be noted that SP1 changes the behaviour of the "Restore previous version" function which can be found in Windows Explorer. Before SP1, folders could be restored to a cascaded location based on the location of the most recent active folder. With SP1, all restored folders are restored to their previous locations.